Help!  This is getting confusing.  If what Peter Borst posted is correct,
the bees with 4.9 mm in the Tuscon area are Africanized.  I thought
everybody was supposed to be trying to eliminate AHB genes.  Africanized
honey bees are legally defined as a pestilence, and are illegal to possess
here in Maine.  Are the bees that folks are working with having 4.9 mm
cells in the Tuscon area really AHB?  If so, does their Africanization make
them inherently less susceptible to varroa, regardless of what sized cells
they happen to inhabit?   Are AHB not the horrible monsters the media (and
our laws in Maine) would make them?   Clearly people in Africa and
elsewhere successfully handle African honeybees and AHB.  Clearly the
public perception (and that of many beekeepers)  of European honeybees
seems vastly to overemphasize the ferocity of the rather peaceable European
creatures.  Could someone definitively describe the bees in question being
kept on small cells near Tucson with some useful diminution of the ravages
of varroa, and if they are AHB tell us what they are actually like to
handle.

Bill Morong